Los Angeles Audio Tour

Highlights

• 
  Dodger Stadium

  Dodger Stadium opened in 1962 on land cleared by one of the most controversial acts of urban renewal in Los Angeles history, the hills of Chavez Ravine where Mexican American families once lived. Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, the year after the Brooklyn Dodgers moved west in 1958, and its location in Chavez Ravine was only available because the city had spent a decade displacing the Mexican American communities that had lived in these hills — communities of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop — promising to build public housing that was never built.

• La Brea Tar Pits

  For at least forty thousand years, asphalt has seeped up through this ground, and you can still smell it in the middle of one of the most urban neighborhoods in America. For at least forty thousand years, crude asphalt has been seeping up through the ground here from natural petroleum deposits below, forming sticky pools that trapped animals that came to drink what looked like water — saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and American horses, along with the birds and insects that fed on their carcasses.

• 
  Whisky a Go Go

  In January 1964 the Whisky a Go Go opened here, and within months its small stage behind the bar was the most important music venue in Los Angeles. The Whisky a Go Go opened in January 1964 and within months had become the most important music venue in Los Angeles.

• 
  Griffith Observatory & Hollywood Sign View

  Griffith Observatory has watched over the city since 1935, and this Art Deco observatory is the most famous viewpoint in Los Angeles. Griffith Observatory was built with a bequest from Griffith J. Griffith, a Welsh-born mining millionaire who was convicted of shooting his wife in 1903 and served two years in prison, then donated money to the city for an observatory and a Greek theater as an act of public penance.

• Laurel Canyon

  Between roughly 1965 and 1972, the houses along Laurel Canyon Road, winding up from here, held the densest concentration of musical talent in American history. Laurel Canyon Road winds up through the Santa Monica Mountains from Sunset Strip to the San Fernando Valley, and in the years between roughly 1965 and 1972 the houses along this road and its side streets housed the densest concentration of musical talent in American history.

All 41 stops

• Olvera Street & El Pueblo de Los Angeles (Downtown / Historic Core)

  Picture forty-four settlers arriving on the west bank of the Los Angeles River on September 4, 1781, to found this pueblo.

• Union Station (Downtown / Civic Center)

  Notice the Spanish Colonial and Art Deco terminal that opened here on May 7, 1939.

• Grand Central Market (Downtown / Historic Core)

  Grand Central Market has fed downtown from the ground floor of the Homer Laughlin Building continuously since 1917, the oldest and largest public market in…

• Bradbury Building (Downtown / Historic Core)

  Picture an interior so extraordinary it ranks among America's finest.

• Angels Flight Railway (Downtown / Bunker Hill)

  Angels Flight was built in 1901 to carry Bunker Hill residents up a 99-foot rise on 298 feet of track.

• Walt Disney Concert Hall (Downtown / Grand Avenue)

  Walt Disney Concert Hall erupts from the corner of Grand and First in crumpled stainless steel.

• Los Angeles City Hall (Downtown / Civic Center)

  Picture a 454-foot tower rising in 1928, its pyramid modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.

• Little Tokyo & Japanese American National Museum (Downtown / Little Tokyo)

  Picture the first Japanese immigrants arriving in Los Angeles in the 1880s to work in agriculture and domestic service.

• Watts Towers (Watts)

  Sabato Rodia spent thirty-three years, from 1921 to 1954, building the Watts Towers alone with hand tools.

• Leimert Park & the Crenshaw District (South Los Angeles / Leimert Park)

  Leimert Park is the cultural and artistic heart of Black Los Angeles.

• Exposition Park & Memorial Coliseum (South Los Angeles / Exposition Park)

  Exposition Park began as an agricultural fairgrounds in 1872 and has been the public commons of Los Angeles for over a century.

• La Brea Tar Pits (Mid-Wilshire / Museum Row)

  For at least forty thousand years, asphalt has seeped up through this ground, and you can still smell it in the middle of one of…

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (Mid-Wilshire / Museum Row)

  LACMA, the largest art museum in the western United States, rises in front of you.

• Griffith Observatory & Hollywood Sign View (Los Feliz / Griffith Park)

  Griffith Observatory has watched over the city since 1935, and this Art Deco observatory is the most famous viewpoint in Los Angeles.

• TCL Chinese Theatre & Hollywood Walk of Fame (Hollywood)

  Grauman's Chinese Theatre was built in 1927, the most famous movie palace in the world.

• Paramount Pictures (Hollywood / Melrose)

  Paramount Pictures has made movies on this Melrose Avenue lot since 1926, the only major studio still in Hollywood.

• Capitol Records Building (Hollywood)

  Since 1956 the Capitol Records Tower has stacked its thirteen circular floors here at Hollywood and Vine.

• Sunset Strip (West Hollywood)

  Here on the Sunset Strip, you are on the most famous mile in the history of American popular music.

• Whisky a Go Go (West Hollywood / Sunset Strip)

  In January 1964 the Whisky a Go Go opened here, and within months its small stage behind the bar was the most important music venue…

• Chateau Marmont (West Hollywood)

  Up the driveway behind those ivy-covered walls sits the Chateau Marmont, the private clubhouse of Hollywood for nearly a century.

• Griffith Park (Los Feliz / Silver Lake)

  Donated to the city in 1896, Griffith Park spreads 4,310 acres of rugged hills and chaparral out ahead of you.

• Silver Lake Reservoir (Silver Lake)

  Herman Silver, a city water commissioner, gave the Silver Lake Reservoir its name when the city built it in 1907.

• Echo Park Lake (Echo Park)

  Every July the lotus blooms pink across much of Echo Park Lake, a small lake ringed with palm trees just west of downtown and laid…

• Venice Beach & the Boardwalk (Venice / Westside)

  Abbot Kinney founded Venice in 1905, and its boardwalk remains one of the world's most theatrical public spaces.

• Venice Canals (Venice)

  Beneath your feet, this bridge crosses one of six canals that survive from the Venice of America Abbot Kinney opened in 1905.

• Santa Monica Pier (Santa Monica)

  Route 66 ends where you are, the western terminus of the most famous road in America.

• Muscle Beach (Venice / Santa Monica)

  Muscle Beach is the birthplace of American fitness culture.

• The Getty Center (Brentwood / West Los Angeles)

  Richard Meier designed the Getty Center, opened in 1997 on this hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains.

• Rodeo Drive (Beverly Hills)

  Rodeo Drive is the most expensive shopping street in the United States, three palm-lined blocks in the heart of Beverly Hills, a city that has…

• Laurel Canyon (Hollywood Hills / Laurel Canyon)

  Between roughly 1965 and 1972, the houses along Laurel Canyon Road, winding up from here, held the densest concentration of musical talent in American history.

• Dodger Stadium (Elysian Park / Chavez Ravine)

  Dodger Stadium opened in 1962 on land cleared by one of the most controversial acts of urban renewal in Los Angeles history, the hills of…

• Koreatown & the 1992 LA Uprising (Koreatown / Mid-Wilshire)

  Koreatown is the most densely populated neighborhood in Los Angeles and one of the largest Korean communities outside of Korea.

• The Getty Villa (Pacific Palisades / Malibu)

  On a Malibu cliff above the Pacific, the Getty Villa is a faithful reconstruction of a Roman country villa, built to house ancient Greek, Roman…

• Malibu & the Chumash Coast (Malibu)

  Chumash people have lived along this coastline for at least ten thousand years, and the twenty-seven miles of coastline you see are among the most…

• San Fernando Mission (Mission Hills / San Fernando Valley)

  Mission San Fernando is the seventeenth of the twenty-one California missions the Franciscan order established under Father Junípero Serra, a chain that began in 1769.

• The Huntington Library & Gardens (San Marino / Pasadena)

  Henry Huntington, a railroad and real estate magnate who built his fortune on the growth of Southern California, made the Huntington one of the greatest…

• Old Pasadena & Colorado Boulevard (Pasadena)

  Old Pasadena, seven blocks of Colorado Boulevard, is one of the best-preserved late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century commercial districts in Southern California.

• Arts District (Downtown / Arts District)

  East of downtown, along the Los Angeles River, brick warehouses that once served industry now hold the Arts District, one of the most vibrant arts…

• Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (Downtown / Civic Center)

  José Rafael Moneo designed the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, opened in 2002 and among the most ambitious religious buildings raised in America…

• Chinatown (Downtown / Chinatown)

  New Chinatown opened in 1938, deliberately built to replace a community demolished for Union Station.

• Elysian Park & Police Academy (Elysian Park / Echo Park)

  Elysian Park, the oldest and second-largest park in Los Angeles, covers the hills above Silver Lake and Echo Park that the city set aside as…

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